


find all the barriers within

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-10
Updated: 2013-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-26 05:35:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles keeps asking about Derek's family; Derek shares what he can, as he can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	find all the barriers within

There's almost nothing left from the fire – a clock with a soot-covered face; a box, charred at one corner, in which Talia had kept her jewelry; a baseball that had rolled into a corner in the hallway; a handful of books, water-damaged and dirty. Derek keeps all of these things in a cardboard box beneath his bed. He doesn't look in there often. As shattered fragments of a full and well-loved life they speak too loudly of loss for him to stand to clean the clock face, or scrape the soot from the jewelry box.

But Stiles is quietly, persistently, kindly curious. He pushes Derek when Derek would rather retreat, comes at him with his heart wide open, every emotion splashed across his face. When he asks about Derek's family it's not to hurt him, or punish him, or to press at Derek's guilt like fingers on a raw, jagged wound – it's because he's interested, and knows what it's like to lose someone you loved, and because he's learned, where Derek hasn't, that remembering things can sometimes dull pain.

So when Stiles asks again, one summer Sunday afternoon, Derek pulls out the box and offers it to Stiles without a word. Stiles is sitting on Derek's faded blue couch, feet kicked up on the coffee table, but he's all attention when Derek slides the box toward him, sits up and studies Derek's face. It's something Derek might never get used to, the way Stiles _sees_ him, and he sits down cross legged on the other side of the table, busies himself with the fold of his body rather than meet the honesty of Stiles' gaze.

Stiles picks up each item with focus and care. He opens Talia's jewelry box, brushes his thumb against the velvet inside, slowly examines the earrings, the necklaces, the rings. Stiles turns back to the other remnants of Derek's old life, lifts out a book, but Derek's attention is all on his mother's jewelry, jewelry he'd forgotten he still had.

There's a ring his mother wore on her thumb, silver, etched with patterns that had no meaning except for their beauty. Derek holds it between two fingers, remembers the flash of his mother's hands in sunlight, in comfort, her steadying hold.

"We can get it resized," says Stiles. The books and the baseball and the clock have been set aside, and Stiles is rounding the table to kneel at Derek's side. "If you wanted." He picks up Derek's free hand from where it rests in his lap, folds the fingers of both hands around it.

"I don't know," says Derek, because he's never considered that he could wear his loss in public through any means but anger, that he could remember every day though some tangible thing, a relic to soften the edges of his grief.

"That's okay," says Stiles gently. "It'll always be there."

Derek doesn't move, doesn't know what communicates to Stiles that his heart is cracking, but Stiles squeezes his hand tight, so tight.

"I miss them," Derek says, which he never does, and Stiles makes a soft sound of understanding; when Derek turns Stiles' eyes are bright, and his lips are pressed together. Derek shifts, presses his face to Stiles' neck, winds his arms around him, and sits amid the comfort that they're weaving together out of clumsy touch and so few words, out of memory and the force of loving each other, out of air and warmth and breath.

**Author's Note:**

> "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." - Rumi


End file.
